Egg & Spoon

  “I didn’t ask for any of it. Neither to be left behind by accident, nor to be misidentified by my only loving relative.”

  “Oh, that. I was not myself.”

  “No, I was not myself. I apparently was Elena Rudina. And you never noticed.”

  “You jump to conclusions. I did notice you were different. I said so to Miss Bristol. But I thought it was anxiety over meeting the Prince and the Tsar. What did you think of the young man, anyway?”

  “Prince Anton? He isn’t a young man. He’s a child.”

  “Don’t be impertinent. If he can be engaged, he’s a young man.”

  Cat didn’t press her point. But it hadn’t escaped her that Prince Anton, like Elena and Cat herself, had noticed Baba Yaga’s izba paddling by. If Dumb Doma was invisible to grown-ups and yet Prince Anton had seen it, that proved he was no grown-up.

  But his status made no difference to her. Cat hadn’t traveled to Saint Petersburg in order to become engaged in marriage. She’d come at the bequest of her great-aunt, whose need to supervise the parentless girl seemed greater than Cat’s need to be supervised. Anyway, what kind of supervision was it, if Cat could disappear for a week at a time and never be missed?

  Cat: “Why did you really pull me from school in London? Why did you have Miss Bristol escort me across the English Channel to Paris? Why did you haul me across Europe by train — Paris, Vienna, Moscow, Saint Petersburg? Just to go to a party and to dance with a beardless boy? Was this really to improve my prospects in life? Or was it to solidify your own relationship with the court of our Tsar?”

  “Don’t you talk to me like that. That’s what being out in the wild has done to you: it has made you common. I don’t need to answer to you, missy.”

  “You aren’t my mother. You aren’t even my grandmother. You are using me for advantage.”

  “Such advantage as I might derive from your shenanigans I could do without. Anyway, you’re wrong. I am an old woman mere moments from the grave, Miss Ekaterina. When I die, a stone marker will be put upon my mouth and you’ll never hear from me again. But while I live and breathe, I will do what I can for you, since no one else seems inclined to pay you the attention you need.”

  “That’s preposterous. The teachers at school are quite capable —”

  “The teachers at your school are paid to oversee you while you are enrolled. That’s all. They must be free to care about someone new when you leave. And your feckless parents wouldn’t bother about your well-being even if you broke all your limbs and sat upon your own nose. I’m tired of having my motivations questioned. As Monsieur d’Amboise pointed out, quite above his station I might add, I’ve never enjoyed the blessings of a husband or children. So I’ve cared for you as if you were my own. Perhaps I have done it in a slovenly manner. In my defense, all I can say is that I would have raised my own children equally recklessly. Bringing you to the royal court is the best I could think of to do, to launch you on your own two feet before I die.”

  “You don’t care about me —”

  “Who else thinks of your future? Who else would bother? Not your bottle-blond mother, duchess of Monte Carlo’s roulette wheel. Not your gin-sozzled father, selling arms to natives in French Algeria. Criticize my practices if you will, but you cannot question my motives. I only mean to save you from contamination by your closer relatives.”

  “May I be excused now?”

  “No. There is one thing further.”

  Cat waited.

  “What are we going to do about Elena Rudina?”

  Cat lost her composure. “It isn’t for us to do anything. She’s a stupid, scheming girl from Mud Village. She took advantage of my kindness, and she left me to danger when I fell from the train. We owe her nothing.”

  Madame Sophia put a handkerchief to her eyes. “And her people?”

  “What do you mean, her people?” Cat had gone wary — like a cat.

  “As I hear you tell it, there’s a brother gone off to Moscow as a houseboy of sorts. And another brother conscripted in the army. And what about that sick mother whom, presumably, the ‘stupid, scheming girl’ was risking her life and liberty to help?”

  Cat fell silent. The grip of the sick mother’s hand upon her own — Cat could still feel it. It was the most maternal experience she had ever encountered. But in reclaiming her own station, Cat could not be responsible for that woman’s life.

  “They took you in,” pressed her great-aunt. “Even if for just a night. Do you think your mother and father would have taken in Elena, under similar circumstances? When they have scarcely bothered ever to take you in?”

  Cat’s voice was cold. “I’ve had too little experience of family bonhomie to comment. What happens to that family is no concern of ours.”

  “Oh, my,” said Madame Sophia, and suddenly she was hoisting herself out of her bed. She was unsteady on her little pads of feet, and groped for the backs of chairs as she neared Cat. “I should have thought travel might have broadened you a little. I see you are just a little buzzing factory of selfishness, the way most children are. You have become mildew on the sponge, a wasp in the jam. Sooner or later, Miss Ekaterina, I hope you come into yourself more admirably. In the meantime, if you won’t care to enquire after Elena Rudina, I will go alone.”

  “Go? Go where?”

  “I shall go to see the Tsar,” she replied. “I shall stand on his welcome mat and pound until he opens the door. After all, ma chérie, under whatever circumstances, that Elena Rudina was kind to me. She told me stories to while away the long hours on that train. And I have come to care what happens to her. I shall see if I can plead for clemency on her behalf.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “If only to find a way to thank her family for taking you in on that first night in Miersk. I gather they had little to spare.”

  “You,” said Cat, “have lost all perspective.”

  “I have not lost my heart,” said Madame Sophia, and she adjusted her new spectacles and then slapped her great-niece across the face. “Nor my aim.”

  We haven’t spent any time considering the Prince. But he was the child to witness what happened next, so here we go.

  Prince Anton was supposed to be resting. The second night of the festival would have to be less thrilling than the first, which had ended in a bizarre social disaster. How he’d enjoyed it, though. One girl disguised as another, and then exposed. That old witch stamping the giant cockerel to bits. The magic downpour.

  He tossed and turned, despising household law. Who could sleep when daylight came needling between the join of the drapes?

  In his stocking feet, he padded about the apartments that his godfather the Tsar had provided for him. The food provided on trays was rich and revolting. The drawers in the furniture revealed no games. Not even a set of playing cards. The only books were biographies of dead Tsars. He tried to kick a wad of clean socks off the baseboards like a rugby ball, but they had no bounce.

  At last he peered out into the corridor. A daytime silence. Most of the court was catching up on its beauty sleep. Even the guard on duty to protect the Prince was snoring in a chair, his lance propped against the door frame.

  Anton tiptoed around the guard and arrived at a flight of marble steps. All around, gilt cupids were stuck against the molding like flies on sticky paper. He looked down. The stairs fanned out into a gallery before descending several more flights. At the ground floor, the great frescoes of the Battle of Austerlitz were bright and triumphant, but their reflections wobbled in the water that glazed the flooring several inches deep, one room to the next.

  The Prince would have liked to try sliding down the railing, but this banister terminated at a marble statue of a warrior with a spear (Courage), and the other at a matching statue of a divine woman with a scimitar (Charity). Both statues displayed a lack of modesty that Anton admired.

  As he didn’t want to impale himself on naked virtue, he descended by foot.

  When he neared the la
nding, Anton heard voices a few rooms off. He’d been staying with the Tsar long enough to discover the servants’ passages, so it didn’t take long to find a panel that swung open at his fingertips. He hurried along a musty corridor tiled in white brick, past numbered doors covered in blue felt. Convenient access for the staff with refreshments, he imagined, or assassins with guns. As I said, he was a boy.

  After one or two false starts, he found a door into the room where the conversation was coming from.

  As it happened, what a lark! He emerged onto the balcony above the throne room. A court circular, folded into a paper aeroplane, lay on a chair by the railing. Below, Anton could see the Tsar walking back and forth, juggling a couple of oranges. The Tsar was in his stockings, too, and there was a hole in one of his heels. For some reason this filled Anton with joy.

  The Tsar was being followed six steps behind by a saintly monk with a long raveled beard. In those days this gentle scholar was an advisor and mentor to the Tsar. His head was clipped in a tonsure like that of some patriarch painted by an Old Master from Siena or Ravenna. I’m told his humble robes stank of cheese. I did enjoy a bite of cheese now and then. And I can still see the afternoon light slanting like broad golden oars through the west windows.

  The boy crept forward in the gallery until his chin was on the railing. The great room was empty but for the two men.

  The Tsar: “I don’t understand what you are getting at, Brother Uri.”

  “Your Excellency. Your report of the farce that occurred last night has piqued my curiosity. I wish I’d been there. You tell a story to amuse, but I take it most seriously. It’s another sign, a sign of dreadful moment.”

  Little did I know, et cetera.

  The Tsar replied, “You can’t imagine that the actual Firebird’s egg was delivered in a carpetbag to my door? You insist that the Firebird is the very fuse of Russia, Brother Uri. How can his egg be packed up like a specimen of beetle found … found by Darwin at some picnic! … and brought home for further examination? Perhaps I entertained that idea last night; the wine was sublime, an eighteenth-century Bordeaux. But in the light of day, I find the notion capricious.”

  “Your Highness, I’ve been studying the lore of the Firebird passed down from the Scythians and other horse tribes of ancient Russia.”

  “Yes, yes, Brother Uri. You mention your scholarly pursuits every time we meet. But the Firebird is only a symbol. And a symbol is insubstantial, a puff of breath on a winter’s morning.”

  “A puff of breath is proof of life. I tell you, the loss of the Firebird’s egg is not to be taken lightly.” The monk seemed out of patience. “I’m not talking about symbols. Using principles derived from Leibniz and Spinoza, I’ve been trying to answer the question: What kind of shadow does a lighted object throw? Say, a lighted candle on a table?”

  “A lighted candle on a table throws candlelight across that table, good Brother Uri. Every Tsar knows this, and most nudniks know it, too.”

  “You misunderstand me. I’ll try again. Suppose you were to light a candle on a table in a dark room. Then you climb on a chair above it and light a very large blazing torch. You look at the tabletop again. What kind of shadow do you see?”

  “You would see the slender shadow of the candlestick, I suppose.”

  “Yes, but what about the flame on the lit candle?”

  “I’ve been too busy governing a continent to try. But one doesn’t need to read the mystics or the rationalists to conclude that you’d see no shadow of the candle flame, Brother Uri.”

  “Not with your naked eye, no. I’ll grant you that. But perhaps the sun shining upon the bright light of a Firebird casts an invisible shadow somehow — a shadow made of light, undetectable by human eyes. An influence we can infer but not see, just as we know the influence of time and honor upon human affairs, though we cannot see time nor honor themselves.”

  “Very metaphorical and a bit sensational, if you ask me.”

  “I’m examining what the shadow of a bright Firebird is, and where it falls. I suspect its influence is essential to the survival of the world.”

  “Have you been getting into the cabinet with the grappa?”

  The monk pressed on. “We need to find that Firebird’s egg. If it fails to hatch, we lose the Firebird’s influence upon the land and people of Russia.”

  “Brother Uri, a shadow is nothing but a dark outline. It has no influence.”

  “Tell that to radishes planted inside a box with a lid on it. The shadow of the lid has quite an influence; the radishes will never mature.”

  “You are a radish.”

  Prince Anton smothered a giggle. He thought the monk called Brother Uri looked more like a bearded parsnip. That boy has a long way to go.

  Radish or parsnip, the monk persisted. “You must send out scouts the length and breadth of Saint Petersburg to hunt for the stolen egg. It can’t be far.”

  “You are assuming the gift actually was the egg of the Firebird and not a decoy made of papier-mâché. In any case, all my available men are digging ditches to try to run this confounded flood back to the sea where it belongs. I can’t afford so much as a footman to scour Saint Petersburg.”

  “You must afford it. It is said, ‘One should see the world, and see himself, as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed, the scale is tipped to the good — he and the world are saved. When he does one evil deed, the scale is tipped to the bad — he and the world are destroyed.’”

  “Interesting. Who said that, your grandmother?”

  “Maimonides. The great Jewish scholastic.”

  “I didn’t know you read Jewish philosophers.”

  “It is said, ‘You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.’”

  “And who said that?”

  “Also Maimonides.”

  The Tsar, who was trying to balance these thoughts between throbs of a headache, turned to the Deputy Sub-Lieutenant, who had come bowing at the door. “Are there other audiences for today?” asked the Tsar somewhat hopefully.

  “Two impromptu visitors, each ignorant of the other and waiting in separate parlors. They were both present last night at the festival. I usually send such petitioners off with a warning. But each declares she has something to tell you about the strange events last evening.”

  The Tsar gave the monk a look.

  “Maybe one of them will be announcing a stolen egg and asking for ransom or reward,” observed Brother Uri. “May I stay and listen?”

  “Very well. Send in one of them,” ordered the Tsar.

  Anton stretched his cramped legs. He was well returned to hiding position when the first of the visitors was shown in.

  “I am Madame Sophia Borisovna Orlova,” said the old woman to the Tsar. “The fool who couldn’t tell her own great-niece from a substitute. And I am the woman who gave you, inadvertently it must be admitted, that egg which Elena Rudina once imagined to be the unhatched egg of the Firebird.”

  “We were just discussing that egg,” said the Tsar. The monk bowed.

  “I can say nothing of that egg. I wasn’t there when the peasant girl found it. I haven’t come about the egg.”

  “More’s the pity. Still, continue.”

  “I have come for clemency.” The old woman squared her shoulders and balanced her pince-nez upon her nose. “I know much of the history of your reign, Your Excellency, and I do not flatter you with falsehoods when I say you aren’t the brute that some of your forebears were. You have, from time to time, shown compassion and even clemency to your subjects.”

  “Citizens,” said the Tsar, “but go on.”

  “My great-niece, returned to me thanks to that itinerant governess she met in the woods, has told me of her adventures. It seems that some in the circle of Elena Rudina, that peasant child, were kind to my poor Ekaterina in her distress. And the Rudin family is suffering with want of a most severe sort.”

  “Blessings on them, and the stars look kindly
upon them.”

  Stars, Firebirds, thought Anton: both of them bright and ineffectual, it seems.

  “I would rather you looked kindly upon that family by releasing their child,” said Madame Sophia. She gripped her hands as if trying to pull her own fingers off. “She is, after all, only a girl yet. I am throwing myself upon your mercy. I would dash myself at your feet if I didn’t fear a broken pelvis.”

  “That child claimed a false identity to gain access to my court and parade herself in front of my godson. Who despite his lineage is hardly canny enough to tell a lark from a lump of coal.”

  Anton bristled at that. Still, I daresay it wasn’t far from the truth.

  Madame Sophia waited. An elderly woman’s caesura carries a certain authority, but the Tsar was the Tsar. She looked him in the eye.

  He stared back lengthily before replying, “I will not release her.”

  The dowager was ready with another gambit. “There is the matter of her brother. This Elena came to you to ask for his release, so he can help feed the starving family. He was conscripted into your army, perhaps to dig emergency canals. In your goodness you might at least liberate him.”

  Oh, right, thought Anton. I was supposed to send out for information about that fellow. I thought it was her beau. What was his name?

  “Luka Rudin,” said the old woman.

  “Enough!” roared the Tsar. “Let the peasants take care of themselves; I have a world in rivulets under my soggy feet.”

  “I beg you to reconsider my requests in the sanctuary of your private chambers.” Madame Sophia bent as low as she could manage, and she began to back out of the Tsar’s royal presence. Anton began to inch away, too, thinking perhaps he could learn about whether the brother was indeed in Saint Petersburg. He might do that much for the hapless girl who had managed to amuse him at the boring grown-up party.

  The old lady was bumped into, from behind, by someone entering without being announced. “I’ve been kept waiting long enough, I have an appointment later on today to have my toenails examined by a lady podiatrist. What’s the holdup?”

  “Why, Miss Yaga,” said Madame Sophia. Brother Uri’s head snapped up.